Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) wants the public to know that he has bonded with the Obama family.
The Congressman who gained infamy for shouting “you lie” at Barack Obama during a 2009 presidential address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, defended himself from accusations thrown at him by multiple CSPAN callers on “Washington Journal.”
Many brought up the incident. Joe, from Abbeville, S.C., described it as “very disrespectful” and accused him of harboring a dislike for Obama “because this is a black president.” President George W. Bush, he noted, had “run this country into the ground, you didn’t say a word.”
“I do not appreciate the way you have treated the president, the way that you do the president,” Joe bemoaned.
Wilson, however, stated that the enmity stems from political disagreements, and has nothing to do with the President himself.
“You indicated that I always oppose the President. That’s not true,” he said. “In fact, I’m really grateful that Michelle Obama’s family, with your Abbeville heritage–her heritage is Georgetown, South Carolina. So I’ve had wonderful times discussing with her our shared heritage of South Carolina.”
What Wilson did not mention, in this discussion about bigotry, is that Michelle Obama’s South Carolina heritage is inextricably tied to the slave trade.
As The New York Times noted in 2009, Mrs. Obama’s great-great-great grandmother, Melvina Shields, was sold as a 6 year-old in 1850, from the South Carolina estate of her deceased master to a new owner in Georgia, “torn away from the people and places she knew.”
And in 2008, just weeks before Barack Obama won his first presidential election, The Washington Post detailed how Michelle Obama’s great-great grandfather was born into bondage in 1850, in Friendfield, S.C., just outside of Georgetown.
He stayed in the area after the Civil War. Some of his descendants, decades later, would move to Chicago, where Michelle was born and raised.
“A lot of times these stories get buried, because sometimes the pain of them makes it hard to want to remember,” she told The Post in 2008. “You’ve got to be able to acknowledge and understand the past and move on from it. You have to understand it, and I think a lot of us just don’t have an opportunity to understand it — but it’s there.”
Rep. Wilson made no acknowledgment of it on Tuesday morning, in praising his and the First Lady’s “shared heritage.” A member of Sons of Confederate Veterans, he has, however, served as an aide to the late pro-Jim Crow Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), called the story about the Senator’s illegitimate bi-racial daughter “a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity,” and, as a State Senator, defended in 2000 the flying of the Confederate flag on the state capitol in Columbia, claiming that “the Southern heritage, the Confederate heritage is very honorable.”
The Confederate flag is still flying on the South Carolina State House. In October, the state’s Indian-American Republican Governor Nikki Haley defended the act, claiming that she has “not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”
